This invention relates to an apparatus on which the heel of the hands may be rested and more particularly a hand/wrist rest support which may be associated with a typewriter, a keyboard and the like, for resting wrists while using same. This invention also relates to the method of making the hand/wrist rest support.
Many industrial problems have been eliminated or minimized in the workplace including injury to the workers by carrying back breaking loads or from inhaling cancer-causing fibers and fumes, lung-damaging dust and other bodily threats. Such threats have often plagued blue-collar workers who often paid with their health or lives because of the industrial climate.
With workplace safeguards largely in place to control such risks, attention is now directed to offices, news rooms, and at switchboards, where growing numbers of persons who work hour after hour on computer keyboards are developing sometime crippling symptoms in their hands.
Some persons try to ignore the symptoms until they can no longer hold a coffee cup, let alone type or operate the keyboard. Other persons, frightened by the disabilities of co-workers, seek professional help before it's too late. Still other persons are banding together to seek changes in their computer equipment or office environment. Also employers and unions have begun to hire companies that specializes in ergonomics, the science of fitting the workplace to the worker, to redesign office equipment and train workers to use their bodies in less risky ways.
It may be hard to understand how working with something so seemingly innocuous, efficient and simple to use as a computer keyboard could damage the body. The problems are thought to stem from their very simplicity: workers in many businesses do almost nothing the entire day except press keys, making many thousands of strokes each hour. Many workers become keyboard athletes typing fast and furiously all day. However, few of them have trained, as athletes must, to perform their task with the proper technique. Many workers are relying on the equipment, that is the keyboards, monitors, tables and chairs, all of which are designed for someone else's body, if for anybody at all.
The result is often a form of over use syndrome, an injury that can be hard to diagnose, but nonetheless painful and incapacitating to the delicate structures within the wrist that make it possible to use the hands. For example, there is carpal tunnel syndrome, in which the nerve passing through the wrist becomes pinched by swollen tissues. The syndrome causes numbness and tingling in the fingers at first, then crippling pain, permanent nerve damage, and loss of muscle control that can render the hand almost useless. The disorder is but one of several hand-wrist problems that beset computer operators.
Researchers who have analyzed the conditions that seem to lead up to hand-wrist problems and clinicians who treat them have identified factors both within and outside the workplace that when properly adjusted can help prevent hand-wrist injuries.
A well designed chair not only helps protect the user's back but also reduces strain on the shoulders, neck and arms and ultimately the hands. Many experts recommend a chair that allows the user to adjust the height of the seat and the tilt of the back and possibly also of the seat. An adjustable table may also be necessary for people who are very tall or very short.
In addition, it has been found that a person should avoid resting the wrist on the edge of the work surface and to assist in such effort to reduce pressure on the wrist to use a padded wrist and palm rest in front of the keyboard. The prior art contains many examples of padded wrist rest supports to which this invention is directed.